Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The relation between information technology and the research tra-
dition in information and computer science could be characterized as
repression, wherein the repressed reemerges but not at a fully conscious
level. Repression is discernible in the insistence that the retrieval proc-
esses created and studied are independent of their particular technologi-
cal instantiation while simultaneously allowing procedures to be strongly
determined by contemporary technological possibilities. For instance,
the stress on query transformation corresponded to the batch processing
embodied in the technology of the 1950s. The theoretical legacy of query
transformation has proved difficult to adapt to modern systems, which do
not necessarily demand a verbally articulated query in advance of search-
ing and which can be—and are—used interactively. Critiques argued
that the assumption of the necessity for a verbally articulated query was
intratheoretic (Heine 1980) rather than intrinsic to information seeking;
this argument has been substantiated by changes in practice enabled partly
by subsequent technological developments. Reemergence of the repressed
can be found in the late articulation and still-limited acknowledgment
of the identity between primitive operations of information retrieval
and logic or computation. Analysis has revealed that the potential trans-
formations for information retrieval on written records or descriptions
are variations on primitive operations of sorting or partitioning and the
transformation of one symbol into another (Buckland and Plaunt 1994).
This can be a regarded as a special case of the known potential for reduc-
ing mathematical and logical operations on an object language to the
writing, erasure, and substitution of symbols (Ramsey 1925/1990, 165-
174) and also corresponding to the primitive computational operations
(Warner 1994, 102-103). The paradigm of query transformation can be
regarded as largely but not entirely exhausted, becoming increasingly dis-
tant from the empirical reality of interactive and distributed systems (Ellis
and Vasconcelos 1999, 8), exposing its rigidity if the original distinctions
are retained, or surviving by ad hoc modifications to its theoretical base
and thereby losing relevance in the first direction and internal intellectual
coherence in the other.
Two paradigms—the cognitive and the physical—have been distin-
guished in information retrieval research, but they share the assump-
tion of the value of delivering relevant records (Ellis 1984, 19; Belkin
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